Since January, Google has been leaving a trail of evidence indicating that it wishes to become a player in online conversations monitoring

Last November the New York Times described the un-ethical business practices of the online eyewear vendor DecorMyEyes. The website was very well ranked in many popular Google search results related to designer glasses. Thanks to numerous consumer complaints on opinion-sharing websites, DecorMyEyes received many backlinks from popular websites and benefited from an increasing PageRank.

To prevent scammers from gaining any visibility thanks to consumer complaints, Google decided to penalize websites receiving too much negative content. Of course integrating automatic sentimenting to the algorithm had its downfall; all controversial or political content was bound to be penalized. To counter this effect, Google decided to blacklist a limited number of e-commerce websites that receive an unusual amount of flak from consumers.

Last month the Mountain View firm announced another feature and technological advancement: “reading level analysis”. Thanks to asynchronous training done with University level literature professors, Google’s algorithms can now detect a website’s “reading level” and divide it up in three categories: Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced.

What should strike the industry specialists is the use of automated text analysis (complexity and sentimenting) by the Internet giant that silently guides many strategic decisions in terms of e-reputation (monitoring, SEO, social media presence…). This technological power could be used for other means than feeding quality results to a search engine, for example, it could be used to enter the web and social media monitoring market with its own solution, or it could supply a robust API to monitoring platforms. We can speculate both ways.